What is the nature of the state-making process? Charles Tilly and other students of the European experience have emphasized the close connection between the need to make war and modern state making. To build modern armies, European states needed to develop coercive and extractive domestic capabilities.

In her thoughtful new book, Patricia Thornton engages and challenges this dominant view of state making through the examination of a non-European case. “In modern China,” Thornton argues, “state-making strategies … have been shaped at least as decisively by normative agendas as they were by military goals.” Indeed, she contends, “state-making and moral regulation are in fact co-constituting historical processes” (p. 2).

To make this provocative argument, Thornton analyzes three wide-ranging historical case studies of political reform in modern China. The first is the Yongzheng reign (1723–35) of China's last dynasty, the Manchu Qing. The second is the Nanjing-based rule (1927–37) of the Guomindang, or Nationalist Party. The third is the Socialist Education Campaign (1962–66) of the Chinese Communist Party. In each case, she argues, the center sought to combat local corruption by extending the moral reach of the state.

Thornton argues that the state was largely minimalist in terms of its financial and economic involvement in the localities, but maximalist in terms of its moral demands. For instance, during Yongzheng's reign, fiscal shortages were redefined as the “moral failures” of local elites, who were held strictly accountable for such failures (p. 44). Similarly, the Nationalist Party enforced more severe punishments for party members who violated the civil service oath than for nonparty members (p. 79). And during the Socialist Education Campaign, Beijing elites sent work teams into local party branches to root out local corruption.

The author's mastery of a very diverse set of historical cases and materials is truly impressive. The empirical detail of the three case study chapters will delight China experts and historians. And her bold argument that in the Chinese case, “military mobilization played only a supporting role in the state-making process” p. (209) will be of great interest to comparativists interested in state building and, more broadly, to those political scientists interested in broadening the study of power beyond its coercive dimension.

What role do the Chinese people play in this politics of virtue? Thornton's analytic focus is on the interactions of central and local elites, but the broader public frequently appears in her empirical case studies. For instance, in her discussion of the Nationalist period in the late 1920s and 1930s, she notes how popular discourse would link “delegitimizing prefixes—such as ‘bandit’ (fei)—to legitimate official titles” (p. 104). Popular rhetoric was thus used to contest the legitimacy of corrupt “bandit officials” (feiguan) and “bandit soldiers” (feibing). But the exact role of popular agents remains a bit vague.

A related issue surrounds the terms or content of moral contention. Vivienne Shue has argued (“Legitimacy Crisis in China?” in State and Society in 21st Century China, P.H. Gries and S. Rosen eds. 2004) that China has a long tradition of viewing good government as characterized by benevolence. In this view, a paternalistic government has the responsibility to care for the welfare of the people. This, Shue argues, is the origin of the modern Chinese state's profound concern about the problem of corruption. Her argument adds depth to our understanding, for instance, of Thornton's anecdote about “bandit officials” rhetoric, which from this perspective is much more than humor. By questioning the regime's benevolence, such rhetoric threatened the Nationalist Party's legitimacy. Indeed, a reputation for being against corruption was one of the reasons that many Chinese sided with the Communists against the Nationalists during the Civil War that followed the conclusion of World War II.

Similar political humor is frequently deployed in China today. In her conclusion, however, Thornton states that corruption discourse today has been depoliticized and even commodified. The Communist Party, she suggests, has succeeded in brandishing the specter of chaos, scaring the Chinese people into acquiescing to continued party rule.

Thornton has written a thoughtful and provocative book. She has established herself as one of a handful of Western scholars with the combination of Chinese language and analytic skills and the theoretical nuance needed to pull off such an ambitious project. Disciplining the State deserves a careful read and will withstand the test of time better than most political science books.